Are you reading the archdruid's blog. He is suggesting that only religion has the power to bring people together, precisely because it is not focussed on rational goals (which are not great in lean times):

Quote:

All through the Long Descent that terminated the bustling centralized economy of the Roman world and replaced it with the decentralized feudal economies of post-Roman Europe, though, there was one reliable source of investment in necessary infrastructure and other social goods. It thrived when all other economic and political institutions failed, because it did not care in the least about the profit motive, and had different ways to motivate and direct human energies to constructive ends. It had precise equivalents in certain other dark age and medieval societies, too, and it’s worth noting that those dark ages that had some such institution in place were considerably less dark, and preserved a substantially larger fraction of the cultural and technological heritage of the previous society, than those in which no institution of the same kind existed.

In late Roman and post-Roman Europe, that institution was the Christian church. In other dark ages, other religious organizations have filled similar roles—Buddhism, for example, in the dark ages that followed the collapse of Heian Japan, or the Egyptian priesthoods in the several dark ages experienced by ancient Egyptian society. When every other institution fails, in other words, religion is the one option left that provides a framework for organized collective activity. The revival of religion in the twilight of an age of rationalism, and its rise to a position of cultural predominance in the broader twilight of a civilization, thus has a potent economic rationale in addition to any other factors that may support it. How this works in practice will be central to a number of the posts to come.

................One possible way forward might be to accept the undeniable existence of supermarkets and their convenience to shoppers, but require that say 20% of the floor space to handed over to a local group of food producers, who would have complete control of that isle, including display, pricing, quality etc and where the supermarket would simply collect the cash on their behave for a fee not exceeding say 10%. I think that would revolutionise local food markets and would achieve very quickly far more than all the Transition groups put together.

What do you think?

I like that idea very much but I think it would be very difficult to achieve with this government and even with a Labour government with Lord Sainsbury a member of that party. Worth a try though!

Are you suggesting, Peter, that the leaders of Transition Groups should turn themselves into a Transition financed priesthood who will demand absolute obedience on pain of eternal damnation from their membership?_________________BLOG

"When the last tree is cut down, and the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find out that you cannot eat money". --The Cree Indians

Are you suggesting, Peter, that the leaders of Transition Groups should turn themselves into a Transition financed priesthood who will demand absolute obedience on pain of eternal damnation from their membership?

It's not my argument, though it/related matters is/are an interest of mine.

Greer's argument is that living the good life works well enough in an expanding economy as a societal principle, but in a declining economy it fails for obvious reasons. In the latter economy, there is nothing rational around which to organise, because people don't have enough and it makes more individual sense to try and "get some for yourself" than to group together and work for long-term projects from which you may well not benefit.

He suggests that the only force with power to do that is religion. Because they are not focussed on what one can get in this world, but something else, they can unite a group of people (empirical evidence all through history).

Transition Town movements will fail because they can only appeal to reason and that won't be enough for the reasons above. And not without changing their nature (which is perhaps possible) will they be able to don robes and lead the people,

Peter._________________Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the seconds to hours?

There is a bombproof argument, here in the UK, for being a religious as opposed to a secular organisation if you wish to endure: the price of land. To buy, and carry on paying the tax for, enough land for a viably-sized community to subsist on is beyond most people or local organisations.